TV, Music and Marketing: Their Current Response To Digital Media

We know Tech is hitting all media businesses, but how are they currently responding?

Howard Scott went along to a meeting, Talking Tech, organised by the European Sponsorship Association to investigate the current state of play – covering the world of TV, Music and entertainment marketing.

Today’s piece covers North One TV; tomorrow, Sony BMG; and the final piece, Kempster, their work with European football and the conclusion.

Highlighting through italics are ours.

ESA Talking Tech
Another day, another conference. A couple of weeks back I attended the ESA Sponsorship Seminar entitled Talking Tech. Even though the title was “Talking Tech” I didn’t let that put me off.

It was aimed at the Sponsorship industry with a slant to how digital tools (lots of reference to new media, but is it still new?) have/can/will later that side of the marketing business.

The panel of speakers for the event had some interesting people on board, and in my usual style I’ll go through each of them in turn now.

John Nolan – North One TV (pictured left)
North One TV are a, according to John, a bit of an anomaly. They sit directly between the more traditional world of TV as we all know it, and the new Internet digital world which, according to some, threatens to destroy TV. The question was raised in response to this apparent paradox of “What actually is TV?” Response, “It’s a box, on the wall, that displays images and sound“. True – and I guess when you look at it like that, the way that video gets into the box is kind of irrelevant, isn’t it?

Perhaps.

For John, with regard to how businesses are going to adapt in this new world, it’s boils down to two things which don’t work so well together – theory and practice. Businesses must listen to theory but at the same time they don’t have the luxury of being able to wait for all the answers and must act on impulse – and in the best interests of their business. Catch 22.

At North One TV all staff are forced to have a myspace page and a blog (really, forced? What do they write? What if they don’t want to do it?). This has helped them to understand the importance and what can be done with these new tools. As such the company are just about to do their first execution of a TV show with an integral blog along side. They think of it now as moving forwards from the world of a few DVD extras. The blog becomes an extra as well as part of the TV experience.

John believes that in this new landscape you can’t get things wrong because in many ways there is no right or wrong – you can just learn by your mistakes.

Tomorrow, Sony BMG

Howard Scott, Digital Manager at The Marketing Store, London, has been working in digital marketing for the past 11 years and is the founder of the blog Adventures in Digital Marketing where he talks about the state of digital marketing and the effect technology is having on the industry in general.